8 / 10
Official trailer
The Lost Boys is Joel Schumacher’s 1987 American horror-comedy film depicting teenage brothers who move with their divorced mother to a California coastal town and discover the local cool kids are vampires. Jason Patric plays Michael Emerson. Corey Haim plays Sam Emerson. Kiefer Sutherland plays David. Jami Gertz plays Star. Corey Feldman plays Edgar Frog. Jamison Newlander plays Alan Frog. Dianne Wiest plays Lucy Emerson. Edward Herrmann plays Max. Barnard Hughes plays Grandpa. Janice Fischer, James Jeremias, and Jeffrey Boam wrote the screenplay.
Warner Bros. distributed the film for theatrical release in July 1987. The Lost Boys is one of the foundational documents of the 1980s teen-vampire tradition that’s considerably influenced later vampire fiction across multiple media.
Pure fun, start to finish, and the most 1987 thing ever put on film in the best way. The leather, the hair, the sax player and the boardwalk all delight me. What keeps it off the top of my scale is that it’s rarely frightening, and a vampire film that never scares me leaves something on the table.
Schumacher’s The Lost Boys is a distinctive late-1980s horror-comedy and a foundation stone for the teenage-vampire fiction that Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Twilight series and plenty of others built on. Schumacher mixes MTV-era energy with traditional vampire conventions, and the balance gives the film its late-1980s identity. Its decision to make vampires cool instead of horrific reshaped vampire fiction for good, and I think it’s the smartest idea in the film.
The MTV-Era Visual Style
Joel Schumacher’s direction draws extensively on MTV music-video visual conventions that were dominant in 1987 production aesthetics. The Santa Carla boardwalk sequences, the cliff-bridge initiation, the rock-concert sax-player sequence with Tim Cappello, all are music-video set pieces integrated into the surrounding horror-comedy narrative. The visual style permanently shapes the film’s identity. The Tim Cappello sequence is my favorite thing in the movie. A sax player wailing on a boardwalk stage has no business in a vampire film, and I wouldn’t cut a second of it.
The music-video aesthetic could have undermined the horror material if the production hadn’t committed to both tones. Schumacher’s craftsmanship handles the tonal balance through particular scene-level decisions about when MTV-energy works and when conventional horror cinematography applies. The cumulative effect produces a horror-comedy production with particular late-1980s cultural identity.
For Writers
Genre productions with strong visual-style commitment to their production era can achieve particular cultural identity that timeless approaches can’t supply. The Lost Boys’s MTV-era visual approach gives the film its certain 1987 cultural identity.
The Two Coreys
The pairing of Corey Haim and Corey Feldman in The Lost Boys launched the Two Coreys teen-stardom phenomenon of the late 1980s. Haim’s Sam Emerson and Feldman’s Edgar Frog are complementary character types: Haim’s nervous teen newcomer to Santa Carla and Feldman’s confident vampire-hunter comic-book obsessive. Their chemistry carries real portions of the film’s running time.
Feldman’s distinct gruff-voice delivery as Edgar Frog has been considerably imitated and parodied across later productions. The character’s deadpan vampire-hunting seriousness against the absurdity of his comic-book-derived methodology produces consistent comic energy that the surrounding horror material requires. The Two Coreys collaboration extended across multiple later productions including License to Drive, Dream a Little Dream, and other films through the late 1980s and 1990s.
Feldman’s Edgar Frog cracks me up. That growl, delivered with total seriousness by a kid who learned vampire hunting from comic books, is the funniest thing in the film for me, and Haim gets less credit than he deserves as the nervous half of the pairing.
For Writers
Casting pairings can launch broader teen-stardom phenomena when the particular actor chemistry connects with audience expectations. The Two Coreys phenomenon traces directly to The Lost Boys’s certain character pairing.
The Vampires as Cool
Kiefer Sutherland’s David and his vampire ensemble are presented as cool instead of as horrific. Their leather jackets, their motorcycles, their fearlessness, their freedom from adult constraints, all are attractive teen-rebellion fantasy instead of as straight horror threat. The combination produces distinct viewer identification with the vampire characters that traditional horror doesn’t invite.
Sutherland is the reason those vampires work. He barely has to raise his voice to be the most dangerous presence on screen, and I understand exactly why Michael follows him.
The film’s commitment to vampires-as-cool reshaped later vampire fiction permanently. Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Angel character, the Twilight Cullens, and other vampire properties trace their fundamental conceptual structure to The Lost Boys’s particular vampires-as-rebellious-teen-icons approach. The cultural influence has been significant across four decades of later vampire fiction.
For Writers
Genre conventions can be deliberately reshaped through production-level commitment to alternative tonal tones. The Lost Boys’s vampires-as-cool approach has permanently shaped later vampire-fiction conventions.
Craft Note
Joel Schumacher directed The Lost Boys as his second major theatrical-feature production after St. Elmo’s Fire (1985). The production cost approximately eight and a half million dollars and grossed approximately thirty-two million domestically, strong commercial performance that established Schumacher’s later career through Batman Forever and other major productions. The Tim Cappello sax-player concert sequence has become permanent 1980s-cinema reference. Two direct-to-video sequels followed: Lost Boys: The Tribe (2008) and Lost Boys: The Thirst (2010), both with Corey Feldman returning. Neither approached the original’s critical or commercial standing.
Is The Lost Boys worth watching?
I give The Lost Boys an 8: a loud, stylish, very funny horror-comedy that shaped decades of teen-vampire fiction. Schumacher’s MTV-era direction, the Two Coreys, Kiefer Sutherland’s gang and the vampires-as-cool idea all hold up as pure entertainment, and I’d recommend it to anybody who likes either genre. What keeps it at an 8 is that it rarely scares me, and I’d have liked at least one scene that made me afraid of these guys instead of jealous of them.
